Color
by Slipstream
Summary: Tyler has a theory about color involving God, innards, and Disney World. Book-based more than anything.


Title: Color (1/1)   
  
Author: Slipstream (slipstream_chan@hotmail.com)  
  
Rating: R (for language)  
  
Notes: A random drablet that evolved once I incorporated my color theory and an incident involving my mother and Disney World. This was a stylistic change for me, as I normally write in third person, but the nature of Fight Club inhibits that. As I absolutely rebel against first person, I ended up doing this in second person, which I have grown to like for this type of fic.  
  
~~~***~~~  
  
Tyler absorbs color. The clothes that he wears, God, they're awful, like he'd tossed a box of grubby crayons with the colors all smudged together into the wash of a Goodwill store and wore the result. Garrish patterns, bad fits, mixing eras and genres and generally shouting a loud 'Fuck you' at any previous conceptions of 'matching.'  
  
Tyler sucks it all up. Things that would never go together on normal people, a red leather jacket, tweed pants, golf socks, and a decidedly feminine looking pastel tank with broken horn-rims, Tyler puts them on and sucks up all their color and spits it out again the yellowed and shadowed hues of sweat-soaked skin under a 40 watt bulb, with an occasional splash of red (that looks almost yellow, really) blood and blue-green bruises and black crusty scabs for color. That's only when he's wearing the clothes, though. On their hangers (not that Tyler actually uses hangers) they're the same old tired garments pulled off some bum or fished from rained-out garage sales or the lost and found and they're tacky and old, nothing like the grand raiment Tyler sports them as.   
  
You think of Tyler and his coat and remember him wearing that horrendous trench in the rain and singing and skipping like some demented Gene Kelly, drunk and bleeding and pouring bottles of dye onto the grass of the city park. Puke green. Blood red. Piss yellow. Shit brown. Watercolors from hell.   
  
Tyler has a theory about colors. "Ask anyone in America," he says, "what their favorite color is, and three out of four times they will say blue. Now, of all the magical colors of the ever-fucking rainbow, why do seventy five percent of us pick blue?"  
  
You say you don't know.   
  
"Think," he says. "What are some things that are blue?"  
  
Smurfs, you say. Blueberries.   
  
He waves you off. "No, think nature, not plastic. Blueberries are purple, anyway."  
  
Birds, you say.   
  
"Nah."  
  
Tree frogs.  
  
"Fuck tree frogs."  
  
The sky.  
  
He snaps his fingers. "Bingo."  
  
The sky?  
  
"Think back to your early religious theory, man. The female earth gods were first, but once mankind learned the fine art of civilization it was all about the male sky gods, who, if you may have noticed, are still the dominant prayer magnets today. Ergo, sky equals god father figure." He's run out of red, so he tucks the bottle away and pulls out another, the color in this one more vibrant, glowing in the moth-deluged lamplight.  
  
"And where," Tyler asks, "will you NOT find blue?"  
  
You shrug, but Tyler wasn't really waiting for an answer anyway.   
  
"Here," he says, and taps you on the chest. "Cut open any living thing and you'll find all sorts of colors, reds and grays and browns and greens and yellows and purples, but NO BLUE. None. None whatsoever. You will not find a single speck of that fucking royal football team colors blue in all the liquid gore that is your organs. Just a nice big sloppy mess of a pallet."  
  
Is that why you chose those colors? you ask, gesturing to the bottles in his hands.  
  
He grins, inhaling sharply, and his cigarette glows brighter despite the rain.   
  
"Colors have power. Flash the right series of primary colors in sequence rapidly and you get kids having seizures all across the orient. When people see the combination of colors you'd normally find in a gutted decaying corpse, it makes their stomachs twist in ways they didn't know it could. You give these colors movement and you can make people sick."  
  
Really?  
  
"Hell," he says. "Look at Disney World, man. You know what ride people puke on the most? It isn't any of the roller coasters. Its Body Wars, that cheap-shit sit and watch a movie ride where you go through the blood stream. Hardened theme park veterans and doctors bent double over trashcans everywhere outside that ride."   
  
You look out across the park and begin to notice a pattern to his mad squirting.   
  
Tyler, you say, what is this a picture of?  
  
Tyler acts like he doesn't hear you. "Blue is an artificial color. The color nature doesn't want, for artificial gods and poisonous frogs. To humans blue is soothing, pastel baby blue, strong blue. Hospital walls, blue jeans, America, plastic, indigo crayons. Blue dye number 9. Blue Jello. Nothing real is blue, civilization makes it so."  
  
Tyler, you ask again, what is this a picture of?  
  
He takes you by the shoulders, leaves big inky handprints on the back of one of your five work shirts, and points up to the two tall buildings lining the south end of the park.   
  
"Tomorrow morning," Tyler says, "when the sky is still pink and green and the clouds are bone-gray from pollution, the tenants of that multi-million dollar high-end corporate apartment complex and the little girls attending the Catholic boarding school to the right will be treated to the world's largest mural of cosmic sexual STD road kill, right on their front lawn."  
  
He sighs, and the blue smoke clouds him for a moment, makes your eyes sting, makes all the colors run together in a blur of flushed-cock pink.   
  
"My God," he says. "It'll be beautiful."  
  
The next morning, as you're flying out to Denver, you notice that the puke bag tucked into the seat pocket in front of you is a nice, comforting, pastel blue of a high noon sky. 


End file.
